An Islamist In Damascus

“THERE IS NO NEWS FROM ALEPPO,” said the merchant at Al-Hamidiya souk in Damascus perhaps a thousand years ago. “Thank God!”

There was news from Aleppo in the last week of November this year and an inflexible statue fell in Damascus in the first week of December. That’s how fast news and danger travel.

History is best understood through the philosophy of the bazaar, and the great market of Damascus is as old as history. Perhaps it always had 4,000 shops and always sold knives made from Damascus steel forged in India and Syrian dresses made from Chinese silk; where the sound of bargains is a waft of music, where chatter is knowledge. The Grand Bazaar of Istanbul is a mere upstart from the 15th century, while Cairo was built only in the 10th. Damascus was capital of the Biblical Arameans; Aramaic

is still spoken. Damascus is the oldest continually inhabited city in existence. Its cathedral was built by the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius

in the last quarter of the fourth century. The power of the Patriarch of Antioch was second only to that of the Pope. The most dynamic general in Arab history, Khalid ibn al-Walid, conquered Damascus in 634, making it part of the emerging Muslim domain. In 661, the

Umayyads seized power and made it the capital of their Caliphate. In 680 the merchants of Al-Hamidiya watched the captives of the epic

Battle of Karbala pass by. The holy martyr Imam Hussain, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, is buried in the great Umayyad mosque.

Muslim tradition asserts, although it elides over details, that the site of this mosque, completed in 715, was also the last rest­ing place of St John the Baptist after the saint’s head was severed in Jerusalem by King Herod Antipas to appease his stepdaughter Salome. When I last visited Damascus, some eight years ago, young couples were still placing their pictures in a glass case on the premises to seek the blessings of St John. The 253-foot Madhanat al-Arus, or Minaret of the Bride, rose on the mosque’s northern wall in 831, named it is said after the daughter of the merchant who provided lead for the roof; she married the Sultan of her time. A muezzin would climb 160 steps of a stone spiral staircase to give the call to prayer. Near the minaret is a replica of the 1371 sundial of Ibn al-Shatir, the scientist who rationalised time by dividing each day into an equal number of hours.

This year, on Saturday, December 7, the Umayyad mosque echoed to cries of “Allahu Akbar!” and “Labbaiq!” as Ahmed al-Sharaa, the latest conqueror of Damascus, gave his first press conference. “Here I am, Allah, at your service!” said followers of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), while America and Britain welcomed the fall of Bashar al-Assad while they began to probe for answers to a hundred questions.

Three powers decided that the vacuum in Damascus was an irresistible opportunity to destroy Syria’s military capability. Israel claimed it had destroyed 80 per cent of Syria’s arsenal. While claims are claims, security analysts who do not speak for public consumption might be wondering if an arsenal which had crossed its sell-by date had been destroyed, creating room for fresh sup­plies in 2025. This is not a war which is coming to an end any time soon. America shredded its inimical targets operating under the Islamism brand. Turkey hit the resources of the Kurdish Workers Party which wants a separate state for Kurds.

Quite unnoticed in the noise of sophisticated bombs, the Hayat Tahrir-al Sham expanded its control to the east, capturing a town called Deir ez-Zor on the Iraq border held by a Kurdish group supported by the US. It is of course too early for clear answers but the questions should be clear once you clear the mind of bias.

The big conundrum is: Has Iran been weakened by the fall of Bashar al-Assad but the war against Israel strengthened?

One video from the excited troops of Hayat celebrating vic­tory at the Umayyad mosque shows them chanting: “This is the land of Islam, this is Damascus, the Muslim stronghold. From here to Jerusalem! We’re coming for Jerusalem. Patience, people of Gaza, patience!” ‘This’ is Syria. In Gaza, Hamas welcomed the change of regime in Damascus.

Since victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan, Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu claimed credit for the fall of the Assad family. That was political triumphalism, understandable in the context. Both are totally aware of the old warning. Be careful what you wish for; you might get it.

If you want to know why Israel carpet-bombed the Syrian defence infrastructure now, you must understand why Netanyahu did not touch Syria while Bashar al-Assad was in power. Assad did not represent a threat. He kept his father’s commitment to preserve the status quo reached after the 1973 war for half-a-century. His successors are unlikely to honour that pact, no matter what they might say about the need for peace during a period of intense vulnerability. The departure of Assad does not mean that their troops, or the Syrian people, do not want the Golan Heights back in their country. Netanyahu has said that the Golan, seized in 1967, is part of Israel for eter­nity. Eternity has a short lifetime in the deserts of Abraham.

For Israel and the US, the change represents an opportunity to partition Syria again. The country is already divided into de facto blocs. Israel would, in its national interest, prefer to make this de jure.

Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been more circumspect. While the future is too volatile for rational analysis, his three immediate objectives are to keep Syria united, eliminate Kurdish terrorists based in the north, and enable the return of Syrian refugees to Adana (famous for its delicate kebab) and dozens of other cities.

AHMED AL-SHARAA has begun to divert his past from attention, by erasing aliases. As Abu Mohammed al-Jolani he was a comrade of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ‘quiet scholar’ who flew the black-and-white Islamic State flag over Mosul. On December 9, the BBC website carried extracts from an interview that Jolani gave to PBS in 2021; so he was not unknown to American state-funded media. The BBC story was written by Mina al-Lami, the corporation’s ‘Jihadist Media Specialist’. How did PBS get the interview?

Sharaa was born in 1982 in Saudi Arabia where his father was an oil engineer till 1989 when the family returned to Damascus. Clearly, events were inducing him towards radicalisation. The Iraq war seems to have been a point of departure; he was in an American prison, Camp Bucca, in 2005. In 2011 Baghdadi sent Jolani to Syria to lead Al-Nusra Front; within a year it became the most powerful Islamist army in Syria but Assad survived the ‘Arab Spring’ and its various hidden derivatives. In 2013 Sharaa split with Baghdadi, who dreamt of a contiguous Caliphate, and made Nusra the Syrian branch of the less dominating Al-Qaeda.

Washington campaigned in media and on battlefield against Nusra as its principal enemy in Syria. Jolani won a major victory by taking over the province of Idlib in 2015, brushed aside Al-Qaeda the following year, regrouped as Jabhat Fatal al-Shaam and then Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS). He turned the focus of his movement on a national objective, Damascus, rather than a confused in­ternational purpose. HTS crushed Al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria by 2020. (Covid does not affect war zones. The casualty rate is immaterial.) In 2021 Jolani welcomed the return of Taliban to Afghanistan. In a surprise to those who like stereotypes, he encouraged a conventional contemporary economy. Those who took a harder line than him protested in December 2023 when there was festive and glitzy opening of a mall. Idlib had a functioning government for its four-million people, with a prime minister and a cabinet. And, of course, a council to ensure obedience to Sharia.

A picture taken in 2022 shows him looking at a painting of the Umayyad mosque at a culture fair in Idlib. Two years later he was holding a press conference at the mosque. That day the Syrian national football team switched the colour of its jersey to green.

Jolani and HTS remain, at the moment of writing, on the terrorist list of the three Uniteds: the United Nations, the United States and the United Kingdom. America has a $10 million reward for Jolani, so now bounty hunters know where to find their quarry. They need to hurry. Washington has sent feelers containing conditions for recognition. The best bet for America is that Sharaa née Jolani will become merely another dictator with a benevolent smile, keep religiosity to minimal requirements, provide a government which slowly acquires acceptance, disrupt the Shia arc from Iran to Hezbollah and its supply lines, control the temperature of confrontation with Israel without risking a flare-up. Russia has al­ready negotiated the continuation of its naval base on the Mediterranean, and let life and death follow some predestined course in a land of war. Israel carefully avoided any Russian target when its air force attacked Latakia. Turkey wants a dilution of terrorism and insurgency in its south.

The region would come to terms with a Sunni Bashar al-Assad, with Iran left to find a new algebra after the loss of an Alawite Shia ally. The rest of our unstable world has other things to worry about.

Can a leopard change its spots? Who knows. Give a leopard four walls and it becomes a sleek cat sipping honeyed milk from a mahogany desk. Time, we are told, will tell. Perhaps. Optimism is not advised. Time is as restless as it is unpredictable.

There will be more news from Aleppo. And from Babylon, Lebanon, Hebron, Golan, Ashkelon, Aden, Ankara, Amman, Gaza, Cairo. And if we are not care­ful, Grozny. And Jerusalem, holy to those who believe that the dead pass through its gates to heaven and hell.

So much faith. So little peace.

Abu Mohammed al-JolaniAmericaBashar al-AssadDamascusgeopoliticsHayat Tahrir-al ShamIsraelJoe BidenRussiaSyria